Combo Wombos.

Combo Wombos.

Getting pop early for synthetic is difficult as you literally have to build your pop. However, you don't have to worry about pop cap or farming or morale. Like you can put 8 billion people on a class 4 planet and it's perfectly fine as synthetic.

Prolific provides +50% population upon settling. So: put two colony modules on a colony ship (6 pop) and settle some random planet and get +3 pop just like that.

Rinse and repeat. As long as you have enough administrator points, which you can get by beelining the government techs after the early +1 movement techs, and you can keep on colonizing and never run out of pop even as synthetics.

For ideology, pick up benevolent for the free colony ship, and later the level 3 ability that provides an extra +2 pop upon colonization. With this trick you can out expand the AI even on Incredible and still have all of the bonuses of being synthetic.

You want Xenophobic for the massive social production and research boosts (building population as synthetic is social production).

It's a way to get around the early game synthetic population problem that blocks expansion.

Point is: if a synthetic gets to expand to 30 colonies, they win. My research and social production is second or third place on a gigantic map with 14 civs at "Incredible" difficulty on turn 30. 100% tax rate, 100% morale. Factories on almost every tile. No need for farms, etc. etc.

the Dalek used to be formidable and have 100 pop on a planet , what happened to stop that ? they were a huge threat when they could have 100 pop on 10 planets , they would come after you with great ships , now I see 1 pop per planet and they are easy to beat. is it the requirement to use promethion and durantium ? can they be cut loose from that